Tomorrow morning, my wife and I are hopping on a plane and flying out to North Carolina. We’ll meet two of our best friends and their newborn son at Charlotte’s airport to drive over to Greensboro. There waiting for us will be four more of our best friends, two freshly arrived from Christmas time with family and two who will host those seven of us who are visiting. This follows a similar gathering in San Antonio at the turn of the last new year, and with our heavy Catholic and Notre Dame influence, we eagerly christen this a tradition upon its second installment, with the hope and intent that it will continue for many years to come. 1
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| Picture from Best Friends Summit #1, NYE 2015-16. |
In my 5+ years of adulting, I have found just how hard it is to make friends, or if not to make friends, at least to develop friendships. I feel like the years we spend in school give us ample opportunity - even if not always with great success - to make friends and develop friendships.2 Our classes, clubs, teams, etc. are full of different mixes of people who variously have things in common with us, and the quality and quantity time spent together creates thorough overlap in our lives that can be the foundation to strong friendships.
I think of high school and my Campus Ministry/Student Ministry Team crew, my comedy club friends, my theatre friends from plays and musicals, and my fellow singers and musicians in chorus and band. I think of college and the great guys in my dorm, Zahm, the wonderful people in my theology classes, my faith-filled peers from Notre Dame Vision, and more than any, the amazing music ministers and friends I found in the Notre Dame Folk Choir. Then I look to my adult life, and I think of… not much.
There aren’t many places or regular groups of people that are consistent for me these days. We belong to a parish we love, but my wife’s work schedule leads us to attend different Masses at different churches from weekend to weekend.3 We’re not acting in shows, singing in choirs, or going to classes, though some of that could be remedied if we committed leisure time to a regular activity. The reality is that we don’t have anything like the context we had during our many years as full-time students.
The thing we do have is our jobs: forty (or more) hours a week where we see many of the same people and variously collaborate, communicate, and spend time together working toward what is hopefully a common goal. Unlike school though, the relationship is meant to be first and foremost professional, so that co-workers can accomplish their work. From there, some people don’t want their social lives and work lives to touch at all while others openly and actively overlap these two worlds.
I’ve worked three different full-time jobs: at my first, I came into a group of co-workers who readily and enthusiastically spent time together socially and happily continued the working relationships into personal friendships; at my second, I commuted to a job where most co-workers lived locally and the only real social scene was among the middle-aged and elderly faculty members who socialized in a quite lively way; at my current job, our small faculty is very amiable and social, but sometimes it’s hard to figure out who’s interested in outside-of-work socializing or not.
I think a lot of the challenge comes down to one’s own outgoingness, one’s own social initiative, and definitely how awkward one makes these kinds of things. While I’m not a socially anxious person, I am an introvert who becomes extroverted only when I’m significantly comfortable and understand the social dynamics of the people and situation. So I find myself struggling mightily trying to connect to co-workers. I’m comfortable with the professional relationships; I’m solid with the day-to-day small-talk and pleasantries; I’m even decent at getting to know my co-workers and learning about their backgrounds, families, and interests. But figuring out with whom to make friends and how beyond the 7-to-4 workday? No clue.
I’m just beginning to understand the depth of intentionality that’s needed to make adult friends. Whereas I grew up with my friends from home and high school and came into my own as a mature and solidifying person with my friends in college, these co-workers and I encounter each other a bit more ready-made and static. Gone are the days of baseball practices, musical rehearsals, retreat meetings, and those oh-so-glorious two-hour dining hall chats; here are the days of faculty meetings, getting home to cook dinner for our families, and running out to the grocery store. I miss the days of routine regular interactions with my developing friendships getting to grow with each meeting; I struggle to socialize well and cultivate friendships in the jungle of adulthood.
I think the grace for me comes in my good old friendships, those people who simply get me and allow me to get them. The ease of those conversations, the simplicity of making plans together, and the natural, organic fun of our time together reminds me of how nourishing and important great friendships are. My old friends welcome me back into our happy world, whether we just spoke yesterday or have failed to catch up for months. My old friends remind me that I am interesting, important, worthwhile, and though my awkwardness may be grand, some people - these very people - had the time and patience to figure me out and welcome me into their lives. I need to carry this into the jungle of adulthood socializing.
So in the meantime, I am on the lifelong track of predictable questions. They began with my wedding after I proposed almost three years ago (How’s wedding planning going?!), continued following our honeymoon (How are you enjoying married life?!), evolved with people’s curiosity (when you gonna start having kids?!), have now transitioned to a new set of questions starting this fall (are you excited for the baby to come?! How’s your wife feeling?! 4), and will beget a new sequence of questions that will surely rotate as we grow and raise our family. It’s up to me to be ready with answers that celebrate the chance I have to talk about my life with another person and to be ready with similar questions so I can receive another person’s story back in turn.
I need to remind myself patience is a virtue. Friendships take time. And that there is nothing that invites another's love more than to take the initiative in loving.5
1 My colleagues have popularized footnotes on this blog, so it’s only fitting that I follow suit... A co-worker once told me that if you don’t like something at the school where you work, just stop it in its tracks one year. Then next year, when the inevitable question “how did we do this last year?” comes up, you cite precedent and effectively change “tradition.” Alternatively, adding something arms you with the goods to institute tradition with the same year-on-year change. In this case, my friends and I call it Best Friends Summit.↩
2 A nice insight from Jenny K.: “This is something I've reflected on a great deal in my post-college years. It was amazing to me how many of my college friendships were ‘friendships of convenience,’ in that they existed because I automatically saw that person in class, clubs, choir, etc. but they faded away when effort was required to maintain them.”↩
3 This means 9:30 Mass at our parish when she hasn’t had to work that weekend or any number of different Mass possibilities when she does work. However, sometimes when you are coming off holiday/weekend work and are forced to go together to 8:15am Mass at the downtown Chicago cathedral on Christmas Day, you turn to shake hands with the people around you for the Sign of Peace and discover you’ve been sitting in front of Patrick Kane and his girlfriend for Mass and just shook hands with the NHL MVP and 3-time Stanley Cup Champion.↩
4 My wife, Katherine, is doing great. No news is good news; our appointments have been wonderfully straight-forward and simple. The little girl, only known currently as Beanface due to her legume-ish resemblance in her first ultrasound, is due on March 13.↩
5 Jenny shared links to some relevant and interesting podcasts: click here or here to listen.↩
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